A Ginette Vincendeau Presentation
One of Legenda’s most eye-catching books of the year is our Festschrift for Ginette Vincendeau — French Cinema: Stardom, Gender and Popular Film, edited by Stuart Bell, Mary Harrod, and Alastair Phillips. Its JSTOR ebook edition (DOI 10.2307/jj.43714677) is also now out, just today.
Vincendeau has been a leading figure in French film studies ever since her breakthrough doctoral thesis was published in 1985. At that time, the average British cinema-goer might imagine that the French watched nothing but nouvelle vague films made by and for discontented students in berets — a stereotype not much more accurate than the idea of the French as bicycling men in striped jerseys selling onions. For Vincendeau, the landscape of French cinema is a great broad sweep of mass entertainment and of the popular imagination, in which actors bigger than their movies seduce the viewer and each other as confidently as Rock Hudson or Doris Day; a milieu in which champagne is drunk by starlets in bubble baths, and cars veer around tight corners shot in la nuit américaine. Popular art is not an indicator of culture, it is culture.
Whatever similarities there may be with Hollywood, stardom is not quite the same in France. Consider, for example, Jean Gabin, who had the expressive face of a singer — doleful, animated, sincere — but who, unlike Frank Sinatra, could act. Like Cary Grant, Gabin emerged from the silent movie age as a travelling variety artist, and got his big break just as talkies established themselves; like David Niven, Gabin fought through the liberation of France in 1944 as a soldier, even if he also acted. In the late 30s, he had been in movies drawn from Zola or Maupassant, and in poetic films scripted by Jacques Prévert. After the war, he played lots and lots of middle-aged men, but not the stodgy middle-aged men who were mayors or Prime Ministers: he would command a demi-monde of crime, whether as a Maigret-type or a gangster. In a comedy, he might be a forger, or a dodgy bookmaker, or something else cosy and victimless. Gabin’s popularity waxed and waned, but he was never not a star, and in his last couple of decades he put out two movies a year almost without fail. Gabin, you might easily say, became the face of postwar France — far more recognisable today than, say, Vincent Auriol or René Coty, two of the longer-serving Presidents of the Republic with whom his career overlapped. Gabin was, in Vincendeau’s words, ‘a monument of French cinema, one of its biggest stars. The only one, perhaps’ (1993).
But enough of Jean: our star is Ginette —
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